I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Where to start? Brave New World , the next expansion for Civilization 5 , has been wrapped up and is ready to go. I've was able to fulfill a development dream and design a trade system to be added to the game. Something about caravans and trade ships moving around the screen delights me to no end and I hope other people enjoy it as well. After much discussion with Bessie, I've decided this would be the best time to leave my position at Firaxis Games and work with Todd and Derek at Gopherwood Studios . My seven years (!) at Firaxis have been wonderful and I'm proud that I got to work with such great people on such great products. I will miss my team tremendously; they are my second family and, while I'm not moving away from Baltimore, I'll miss talking to them daily and being a part of their lives. That said, I'm both nervous and excited about working at Gopherwood Studios. I'll be a contractor, largely responsible for pulling in my own clients, a...

Sid Meier's Railroads! went gold early Monday afternoon and should be hitting the shelves around October 17th. While I don't think it'll ever be "fun" to finish a game, working on Railroads! with my team at Firaxis has been an awesome experience from beginning to end. I'm immensely proud to have worked with these individuals and, for the first time, feel that I contributed a significant portion to the final product. It's hard to know how well an economic strategy game with trains will do in one of the toughest Christmas seasons in years (with the PS3 and Wii launches and the World of Warcraft expansion), but I hope that it surprises some people who wouldn't normally expect to enjoy laying track, dropping depots, and routing trains. I've always enjoyed economic strategy games, and I feel like we've made a title that stands with the best of them. Official site (Best promo site for a game I've worked on.) Demonstration Video Previews: GameS...

Friday afternoon, Don, Casey, and I were "testing" Sid Meier's Railroads multiplayer. The game involves laying down railroad track, building depots, buying and routing trains around to pick up goods at certain industries and deliver them elsewhere to make money. The way to win the scenario was by buying out all of your opponents' stock. Anyways, Casey was having a good game and I was having a bad one, and he bought me out pretty early on, with a complimentary "suck it!" when he purchased the last bit of my stock. When you buy out a player you get ownership of all their tracks, trains, and stations, but somehow I was still making money even though I was out of the game. It turns out when a buyout occured, the trains change owners but the train cars did not. So Casey's trains that were once mine weren't making him any money; in fact, they were actually losing money because he had to pay maintenance on all of them while I (a "dead player") wa...

My life's been interesting for a while; finally things have settled down a bit. I left my position at Big Huge Games and recently joined Firaxis to work on an unannounced title. I wish Big Huge Games the best; I'm extremely proud that I was invited to work with them on Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends. ( Rise of Legends has been getting some excellent previews , btw.) They are an exceptionally talented development team. I wish them the best of luck and I hope Rise of Legends tops the charts for a long time and my friends make a lot of money. That said, I'm thrilled to be working on this project at Firaxis and will share details as soon as I have a chance. In other news, my brother, Todd, got a job designing cellphone games at GameLoft in Manhattan. We both want to be game designers and I'm a bit jealous that he gets his shot first. It's his dream job, but he's not much of a big city guy. Seeing some hilarious stories on the horizon, I harassed him into ma...